ARCHIE THE ABDOMEN
Training aid for medical students.
In medical education, real patients are becoming increasingly difficult to access due to ethics, competition with other trainees, and the patients prerogative to deny examination by students. Hands-on experience is essential to the education of the doctors of the future. Many products exist to provide simulation of many procedures but no product exists for training of abdominal examination: my product aims to address this.
My solution is to provide a simulated patient to aid medical students particularly in the early years of teaching. The product focuses on examination technique, and can give them experience of abdominal conditions they may encounter as a practicing doctor.
The simulator is operated by the student or tutor using a simple control interface which in-turn controls pistons which move air in and out of bladders which form the shape of the artificial liver. The controls can simulate the majority of liver diseases including enlargement, hardening and nodules. The simulator also gives tenderness feedback to aid diagnosis and make the simulation more realistic.
I am particularly interested in the creative, hands on side of design. In the future, I would like to follow a path into the area of prop design for TV, Theatre or Film.
